Picturegate

Wow. Haven’t been paying much attention to the news recently. But this whole picturegate thing has certainly exploded hasn’t it?

For you poor innocent non-Irishers I’ll give a brief recap. Some artist hung two paintings of our glorious leader Brian Cowen in two different galleries in Ireland. Let’s just say they weren’t the most flattering, as you can see below:

A piece of vaguely amusing satire you might think. Or I might go heh, and then forget about it. Or at least I would’ve done if Mr. Cowen hadn’t had a rather poor reaction.

And now look, RTE have issued an apology, FF have come out with crappy statements, and that red-flag word “censorship” has come out to play. Especially as the Gardaí are now involved. Good god, you’d laugh if it wasn’t so ridiculously terrible.

I’d play along and a caricature of Cown, only it’d be too much for me to look at everytime I visited the blog. Instead I’ll just share the link love.

Hooray for Irish wit, I say. Those paintings seem, to me, to be superb example of contemporary political satire.

If Mr. Cowen has failed to understand the nature of the matter, I wonder if someone might kindly knock him over the noggin — so to speak, in as well — to pointedly nudge him with a dissertation about the importance of self-critical perspective, in the functioning of an open government.

He must be taking himself so very seriously, perhaps someone will kindly send him a singing-chicken-o-gram, or somesuch, to lighten his mood… oh but hey, perhaps the Irish government has not had so many, many situations as had the US government, now effecting to the situation that "our people" may have much difficulty in taking our government seriously, at any level (or understanding it, to begin with…)